thus have i heard

If you go to a quiet place and sit down—crossing your legs, keeping your back straight, and maybe closing your eyes—and you then pay very close attention to what is actually happening, you will notice episodes of experience arising and passing away, flowing one after another in a rushing stream of consciousness. Welcome to the real world.
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One of the many controversies growing up around the notion of mindfulness is whether or not one can be mindful of unwholesome states, such as anger or hatred. On one hand there is the view that one can be mindful of anything, and that it is precisely by becoming mindful of unwholesome states that one is able to abide in such states without having to judge them, suppress them, or act on them. On the other hand there is the view that since mindfulness is a wholesome state and anger and hatred are unwholesome states, and since one cannot experience two such opposite states in the same mind-moment, it follows that what appears to be mindfulness of unwholesome states is actually the rapid modulation between one and the other—moments of mindfulness and moments of anger, for example.
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It is time for us to evolve. We know well enough that species adapting to a changing environment survive, while those that do not go extinct. We also know our environment is changing and that our own activities are contributing to those changes. We therefore know enough to understand: we must either evolve or perish.
For the first time in history, our challenge is not the implacable forces of external nature, but the inner toxins of our own nature. The radical changes in the ecosystem threatening our survival are not being thrust upon us from the outside but stem from the greed, hatred, and delusion lodged deep in our own hearts. We are our own greatest threat and are thus in the unique position of having to adapt both to ourselves and from ourselves.
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The most difficult Buddhist idea to explain, I’ve found, is not interdependent arising or nonself, challenging though these are, but equanimity. How is it that one can neither like nor not like something without being emotionally detached or indifferent? Our sense of identity is so bound up with our desires that to many people the thought of being without preferences for one thing or another is tantamount to being stripped of the very quality that makes us human. Nonattachment is just so dry. Give me the pot-bellied laughing Buddha any day (who, of course, is not a Buddha at all but a Chinese folk deity), rather than the austere figure presiding over our meditation halls with barely a hint of a smile on his face.
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Imagine you walk into a small empty room that is totally dark and are asked to locate its center point. How might you proceed? Unable to use the sense of sight, you might begin by going around the room with one hand on the wall, exploring the perimeter. Once you’ve turned the corner four times, you can be fairly sure you are more or less back where you started. Next, you might push off boldly from one wall and traverse the whole room until you crash into the opposite wall. Bouncing back and forth between these two walls, you would eventually get a sense of the midpoint between them. Thus oriented, you might then shuffle between the other two walls along this centerline until you find what appears to be half the distance between them.
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